Health Care Placement

During the two months i was in Ayacucho, there was a health care strike in place. It had been in place for about a month before i even arrived, so it was quite frustrating for the girls who were volunteering in healthcare. Especially for the girls who were using this program as an internship to receive credits for their university studies in nursing and medicine.

So healthcare were on a strike and the girls barely got to go to any placements which was disappointing for them during their stay and most of them left before the strike finished. So it was my second last week of volunteering and there were only 2 girls that were doing healthcare left from about 9, and we got a call from one of the surgeons at the hospital (they were doing life threatening operations and emergencies only), asking for 2 volunteers to assist him that night. So Laura one of the healthcare girls was going to the hospital the following night to help with the enormous amount of live births they have every night, so that left Natalie who was also healthcare. But they needed one more person, so i volunteered since i am not too squeamish with blood and that sort of thing.

So off we went to the hospital, and had a very interesting afternoon. We watched as the surgeon stitched a young mans head back together- lots and lots of blood with that one, watched him insert a catheter and finally went into surgery with him whilst he performed an emergency appendectomy. It was the most surreal thing ive ever done. We scrubbed in, like real nurses and doctors do, put on our scrubs and went into the operating room. This was an amazing experience, this could never ever have happened in Australia or America. They gave the lady an epidural, she didn’t go right under, and then he started work. He cut her open and started to remove her appendix, which was very very enlarged and looked like it might have been very dangerous to leave it in any longer. So there was Natalie and I, literally looking over the doctors shoulder whilst he explained things to me about the procedure. We passed him cutting implements and had a front row seat to the surgery. It was seriously amazing, that I was in an operating room, completely unqualified and assisting a surgeon. Haha very surreal but an amazing experience. I had a great time, and the Dr even offered to teach me to stitch someone up if i wanted, but i respectfully declined!